1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a passive-type exercising device having an exercise assistance mechanism for assisting exercise of a user as well as applying an exercising load to the user by operating in a predetermined operation pattern and its control device.
2. Description of Related Art
A passive-type exercising device that is used passively by a user has been known in the past. Such a passive-type exercising device includes an exercise assistance mechanism for applying an exercising load to the user as well as assisting exercise of the user by operating in a predetermined operation pattern such as vertical motion, turning, and oscillation, and a control device for controlling the exercise assistance mechanism.
In particular, the user that utilizes the passive-type exercising device can exercise easily for example by mounting on the exercise assistance mechanism by which a part of the body is moved and the exercising load is reduced.
Also, the more the user actively exercises while being assisted by the exercise assistance mechanism, the larger the exercising load actually applied to the user becomes, thus increasing exercise intensity such as MET; Metabolic Equivalent which indicates the user's exercise intensity. Here, MET is a unit that expresses the exercise intensity by how many times of the resting conditions it corresponds to, in which sitting in a resting state corresponds to 1 MET and average walking corresponds to 3 METs.
In such a passive-type exercising device, when a control device derives the exercise intensity, the following method was proposed. In particular, the passive-type exercising device described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-260182 computes the exercise intensity from outputs of a sensor provided at the exercise assistance mechanism. Also, the user's mounting method is determined by the change of the integrated electric power or the drive current magnitude of a drive unit that drives the exercise assistance mechanism, and the exercise intensity that is corrected in accordance with the mounting method is computed.
However, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-260182 does not disclose a specific correction method for the exercise intensity. In other words, with the method described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-260182, the exercise intensity may not necessarily be computed with high accuracy. Thus, there has been a room for improvement in the past methods for deriving the exercise intensity in the passive-type exercising device in terms of improved accuracy in deriving the exercise intensity.